Can STV get more than nul points for its Poland purchase? Well, if Sarkozy can get Carla's vote …

It's a lesson I learned one night a long time ago when an Edinburgh cabbie delivering me home informed me it was the KGB who killed Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1963. I always thought it was a heart attack that did for him. Silly me. The tutorial continued so long after we arrived at our destination that the driver let me off the fare, the least he could do under the circumstances.

American actress Shailene Woodley recently had a similar experience in the back of a cab, though unfortunately she is treating her "lesson" a little more credibly than I did mine.

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"I first heard about the benefits of eating clay from a taxi driver," she reveals in an interview. "Your body doesn't absorb it, and it apparently provides a negative charge so it bonds to negative isotopes. And - this is crazy - it also helps clean heavy metals out of your body. My friend starting eating it and the next day she called me and said, 'Dude, my shit smells like metal'."

Like I said - extreme caution.

The Eurovision Song Contest is notorious for the way regional friendships and rivalries affect the marks. Think Country A has forgotten the secessionist movement that Country B encouraged two centuries earlier? Think again. Nul points!

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But it's not often the competition pitches together two countries who are virtually at war in the present day. This year it has happened, though, as both Ukraine and Russia made it through tonight's semi-finals to Saturday's final.

It should be quite a showdown. Any thought that host city Copenhagen will act as a neutral venue are dashed by the booing that accompanies Russia's Tolmachevy sisters as they perform their song, Shine. Then again, with a lyric that goes "Living on the edge, closer to the crime/Cross the line a step at a time" it's hardly surprising. Who said political pop was dead?

Today's announcement of the four-strong Turner Prize shortlist marks another bumper year for Glasgow - two of the quartet trained at the School of Art and another lives in the city. But what is also notable, say the high heidyins at Tate Britain, is the way the internet influences the artists' work, with YouTube being a regular source of material and inspiration.

Another Glasgow artist who may one day find her way on to the shortlist is Rachel Maclean, 26, who features on the cover of today's Sunday Herald magazine. Turns out she's a bit of a YouTube addict too.

"It is quite an amazing tool," she tells me. "It's like a stream of consciousness. You type in one thing and get another thing and another thing and another thing. There is this sense of just jumping around and finding something with a disparate link to something else."

And here was me thinking it was all just cats and teenagers doing bad covers of 1980s power ballads.

As ITV celebrates buying the American production company behind such highbrow offerings as Bridal Bootcamp, Real Housewives Of New Jersey and Pawn Stars, its Scottish franchisee today confirms the schedule for its new channel, STV Glasgow. "Excitement is building," says channel editor Paul Hughes, unintentionally employing one of the taglines from The Lego Movie.

The new channel promises "an entertaining mix of news and features, live and interactive formats, as well as quality acquired and archive programming". Reading between the lines, I'm guessing it means Take The High Road on a loop with interruptions for news and weather and "classic" episodes of Taggart, if they can find any.

It isn't all bad news, though. As part of its commitment to providing an hour of non-English language programming every week, STV Glasgow has raided the piggy bank, found some zlotys left over from when the girls in advertising went to Krakow for that hen weekend, and used them to buy a Polish wartime drama that The Economist, no less, has hailed as a rival for "anything comparable from Britain or America in recent years".

The drama is called Czas Honoru, which translates as Time Of Honour. It's in Polish, of course, but there are subtitles, so it's no different from watching The Killing or Borgen. Which means, I suppose, that STV Glasgow is the new BBC Four. Well, we can always dream …

It's been an interesting week for women in football. On Wednesday, former Celtic scout Helena Costa, 36, becomes the first member of the distaff side to become coach of a professional French team (Clermont Foot 63, since you ask). Then on Thursday it was announced that Scot Kylie McMullan will become the first female assistant referee in a Scottish Premiership match.

Today, transgender footballer Jaiyah Saelua becomes a film star of sorts with the release of Next Goal Wins, a documentary about the American Samoan men's side she plays in and their campaign to qualify for the 2014 World Cup finals. American Samoa are widely regarded as the worst team in international football. Among their heavier defeats - or "humpings" as Tam Cowan might put it - is a 31-0 loss to Australia, a world record.

Jaiyah Saelua is a trailblazer. Mind you, given American Samoa's woeful record, the description given to her by one British newspaper this week - "the transgender John Terry" - does seem unfair on the Chelsea man. Perhaps it was written by an Arsenal fan.

Of all the people I've met in my unremarkable journalistic career, the one who most deserves the description "tall, beautiful, used to date Mick Jagger and is apt to make men tongue-tied" is Carla Bruni.

It was 2007, the former supermodel had a record out, and I was invited to her London hotel room to ask her interesting and incisive questions about it, a task I undertook with more enthusiasm than skill. This was before she became the First Lady of France, though as luck would have it we met on the day of the French elections.

She didn't have a vote - she still kept her Italian passport - but if she did, she said, she wouldn't give it to Nicolas Sarkozy. A few months later she met him at a dinner party. Funny how things turn out, isn't it?

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Now, still married to Sarko but with The State Banquet Years behind her, Bruni has returned to her musical career. Later this month she presents a three-part programme on BBC Radio 2 called Carla Bruni's Postcards From Paris.

However, the programmes are being recorded in a studio in the French capital, so any hopes I might have of renewing our acquaintance are set to be dashed. "Quel dommage!", as they say in the Clermont Foot 63 dressing room after another American Samoa-style "humping".

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